No Place Called Home

For Most Of The World`s 13 Million Refugees, A Life Of Suffering And Despair Is Underscored By The Grim

Realization That They Have Nowhere To Go And No One To Turn To

October 09, 1988|By Special report by William Mullen, a SUNDAY staff writer.

The last decade is rife with incidents of governments sending their armies across borders to attack UNHCR refugee camps on punitive raids. Guatemala has sent expeditions into Mexico against Guatemalan refugees. El Salvador has sent troops after its own citizens in Honduras. Uganda has murdered Ugandan refugees in Sudan. Vietnam has attacked and shelled refugee camps in Thailand. Afghanistan sends terrorist bomb squads and assassins after Afghans in Pakistan.

When such incidents occur, UNHCR can only protest through diplomatic channels and public condemnation through the press.

Public censure, however, is almost pointless when the raids are conducted by rebel groups beholden to no government or international organization, as is the case with Renamo in Mozambique. One seldom encounters armed soldiers anywhere in Malawi, a rare and welcome treat in security-conscious Africa. Certainly Malawi cannot afford to garrison its 300-mile border with Mozambique to protect refugees. That makes the camps easy pickings for Renamo soldiers.

FOR THE RECORD - Additional material published Oct. 30, 1988:A clarification.The attribution for a quote by Dr. Mohammed Azam Dadfar was inadvertently left out of the Oct. 9 article about refugees. He originally made the statement to the London Observer newspaper. SUNDAY regrets the omission.

``Renamo sometimes crosses into Malawi to steal food and cows from the refugees,`` said a Malawi government official in the Ntcheu District on the country`s western border with Mozambique. ``Two and a half weeks ago the wells on the Malawi side went dry, and a group of refugees went (1 1/2 miles) inside Mozambique to their old wells. They were caught there by a group of Renamo soldiers, and two of them were shot to death.``

The vulnerability of the refugees in Malawi came home personally to me last November when I toured camps in the Ntcheu district with a British journalist and a British doctor. At the end of a long day, we headed out of the area in a government vehicle. I noticed a group of refugee women taking water from a well 20 feet inside the Mozambican border, the road on which we were driving. I asked the driver to stop so I could photograph them. Having done that, I asked one of my companions to photograph me standing in ``war-torn`` Mozambican territory.

The doctor, a knowledgeable veteran of several years of refugee work, chided me for my horseplay. Two days later, we discovered that Renamo soldiers apparently had watched our impromptu stop, and 10 minutes after we had left, raided the camp from which the women at the well had come. They took several cattle and half a dozen people back to Mozambique.

UNHCR`s inability to protect refugee groups ironically has led to the most ``successful`` solutions of at least two long-standing refugee problems in Sudan and Honduras.

Between 1979 and 1982, following Idi Amin`s downfall, about 350,000 people fled from Uganda`s northwestern provinces into southern Sudan. Many were from the Arua district of Uganda, which happened to be Amin`s home province. Though most were apolitical peasants and tradesmen who had little or no connection with Amin`s government, they were singled out for revenge by the new government of Milton Obote. Arua became the scene of horrendous crimes as Obote`s army stripped the province bare, literally razing entire towns and villages and robbing, killing and raping along the way.

The exodus from Arua to the Sudan was, as all refugee movements are, a harrowing one. People were murdered as they fled from pursuing Obote troops. As they crossed the border, many refugees were robbed by Sudanese border guards of whatever possessions they had managed to bring with them. UNHCR was totally unprepared for the exodus, and it took two years to set up adequate camps.

But the Ugandans happily discovered that they had moved to a vastly underpopulated, fertile part of the world with abundant if untapped water supplies. Through their years in exile, they began to do something that rarely happens with refugees in the Third World. They began to prosper in their new land.

In 1985 a civil war broke out in southern Sudan. The southern Sudanese tribes, Christian and animist alike, rose up in revolution against the Sudanese government in Khartoum, which is dominated by the nation`s Arab Muslim majority. The Ugandan refugees, the majority of whom are Muslim, again found themselves being singled out for violence.

Since 1985, the Ugandans have been running again, trying this time to get back into Uganda. Obote has since been kicked out, and the new Ugandan government has guaranteed their safety, but the refugees understandably have been wary. More than half have already returned, but to all, it has been a painful dilemma: Which side of the border-Sudan or Uganda-holds the most danger?

Early last November Alemi Quick, 30, brought his two wives and nine children back to Arua from Sudan on a truck convoy organized by UNHCR for several hundred returning refugees. He hadn`t been in Uganda since February, 1982, he said, when Obote soldiers raided his village, looting, burning and murdering the occupants, including his grandmother.